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To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
Matthew Arnold -
Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself.
Matthew Arnold
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So, loath to suffer mute. We, peopling the void air, Make Gods to whom to impute The ills we ought to bear.
Matthew Arnold -
The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.
Matthew Arnold -
One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.
Matthew Arnold -
And amongst us one, Who most has suffer’d, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne.
Matthew Arnold -
Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe, Returning home on summer-nights, have met Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe, Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet, As the punt’s rope chops round.
Matthew Arnold -
Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
Matthew Arnold
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Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
Matthew Arnold -
Calm soul of all things! make it mine To feel, amid the city’s jar, That there abides a peace of thine, Man did not make, and cannot mar.
Matthew Arnold -
What actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent and the same also.
Matthew Arnold -
The World in which we live and move Outlasts aversion, outlasts love: Outlasts each effort, interest, hope, Remorse, grief, joy.
Matthew Arnold -
English civilization - the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society - that is what interests me.
Matthew Arnold -
Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.
Matthew Arnold
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Peace, peace is what I seek and public calm, Endless extinction of unhappy hates.
Matthew Arnold -
Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.
Matthew Arnold -
And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well - but ’tis not true!
Matthew Arnold